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Comment by hash07e | Hacker News Reader

Errr...

How about turn on those Nuclear plants?

Natural gas cannot be replaced by nuclear energy (or any other source of electricity) for many applications, at least not in the short term. For example here in Germany, many homes use gas boilers (heaters) for heating space and water. You would need to rebuild a lot of infrastructure to use electricity (which Germany plans to do, but obviously this will take years if not decades).

Is there a difference between the kind of gas used in power plants and the kind for residential use? If not, couldn't nuclear plants reduce the need for gas in power plants, allowing that gas to go to heating homes instead?

There is currently almost no gas used for electricity generation in Europe (much too expensive). Even under normal conditions, heating and industry consume an order of magnitude more gas than electricity generation.

EDIT: This is wrong, as the commenter notes below, this is energy, not electricity.

Citation? The number that I consistently see cited is 1/4 of all electricity in EU comes from Natural Gas [0].

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2...

You are citing historical numbers for primary energy (mostly transportation and heating), not for electricity.

ElectricityMaps has some live data for electricity generation: https://app.electricitymaps.com

Ah, good catch, my mistake. And thanks for the map! That's exactly what I was looking for.

Do you a citation for that? It seems unlikely that 20-25% of EU electrical generation shifted in the last couple of years. Solar has been cutting demand for more-expensive gas but 20% is still far more than “almost no”.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51258

> Starting in 2016, consumption of natural gas in Europe’s electric power sector increased as a result of the systematic retirement of coal-fired power plants across Europe and the retirement of nuclear power plants in Germany in particular.

https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/european-electri...

> Fossil gas power declined 8% since 2019, generating 18% of EU electricity (524 TWh).

I think the underlying discrepancy might be explained by electricitymaps.com reporting real-time usage. It would be very easy to believe that today's usage is not representative of an entire year when you're looking at a brief interval in summer when solar is running at maximum efficiency, heating needs are non-existent, and everyone on the continent has been reacting to the possibility that there might be a gas shortage at any time.

Gas plants are almost universally peaker plants, designed to quickly ramp up and down, while nuclear plants are almost universally baseload.

There’s nothing in principle stopping us from building peaker nuclear reactors, but nobody except the military ever does so. As a result, nuclear largely cannot substitute for gas without massive storage systems that don’t exist.

It could but so would accelerating solar and wind deployments.

At this point those are probably more cost effective solutions. Trying to restart a reactor that youve been going through the shutdown process for about 5 years is probably going to cost more.

It's super weird how many people think this restarting the nuke plants is a solution. It'll cost a lot and wont make much overall difference.

(of course, neither will anything else really... there are zero short term solutions to Germany's russian gas dependence other than kowtowing).

I wasn't proposing restarting nuclear plants as a solution. I was suggesting Germany made a huge mistake shutting them down in the first place.

> (of course, neither will anything else really... there are zero short term solutions to Germany's russian gas dependence other than kowtowing).

Kowtowing isn't a solution to Germany's Russian gas dependence, it's accepting it as inevitable. It may be the only solution to Germany's gas shortages.

You're forgetting two things: not all natural gas is used for heating and Russia does not supply 100% of the natural gas used in Europe. If a nuclear plant can generate enough electricity to shut down a natural gas plant, the natural gas which would have been burned for electrical production is then available for applications like heating which are hard to quickly replace.

Russia supplies about 40-45% of the EU's total natural gas, so there's a big question about how quickly imports can be scaled up. The energy mix in the EU electrical grid is roughly a quarter natural gas so there's a fairly large amount which could potentially be shifted to another electrical source.

That leaves the question of how well all of those measures come together along with efficiency improvements and conservation (e.g. getting everyone in the EU to turn their thermostat down by 1°C would be roughly ⅓ of the total Russian imports according to https://www.iea.org/news/how-europe-can-cut-natural-gas-impo...). Given how seriously every government in NATO has been taking this, I would not be surprised to see things moving at faster paces than we're used to.

> Natural gas cannot be replaced by nuclear energy (or any other source of electricity) for many applications, at least not in the short term.

Yeah, turns out that the folks running things put on a hell of a campaign to keep nuclear from being researched, and keep fossil fuel profits rolling in.

This is the world we live in. It can take _months_ to switch if we organize ourselves properly, but good luck.

Electric heaters are cheap (it's just a glorified resistance). It's easy to switch home heating from gas to electric (with portable devices). Maybe not for every room but enough to survive a winter or two. Water heating is more complicated.

Resistance heaters are a very inefficient way to heat (yes, I know they are 100% efficient), and I wonder if the grid could handle a significant number of homes switching to electrical resistance heat?

Hopefully the government is already incentivizing switching to heat pumps, but that's not a quick solution.

The heaters them themselves are cheap, but running them is not. I've done the calculation for my situation last year in Germany, and using the gas heating came out much cheaper (at least with gas prices last year). I think that's because most portable electric room heaters are not as efficient as the built in gas-based heaters. Does anyone know more about this topic?

Cost isn't even the question. We are talking about a severe gas shortage scenario here.

My understanding is that a significant amount of natural gas is being used for electricity generation. Generate that electricity from another source, and more gas will immediately become available for direct heating.

Of course we don't have the capacity to do that today, and that's the problem.

Yes, as I've said before, the problem for Germany and Europe more broadly is that nuclear reactors do not create natural gas.

Besides heating, natural gas is a major component in many industrial processes. It's also used as input for a wide variety of petrochemical products. Can't make those from nuclear power.

People tend to overlook that nearly a quarter of all oil & gas goes into non-energy use. I can't think of a single modern product that doesn't use petroleum-based products in some way.

Yes, but if you reduce natural gas use where there are alternatives, then you free it up for things where it's 100% necessary.

Bearing in mind the contents of this graph and that unlike gas nuclear power isnt dispatchable, how much difference do you think it would make?

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

From that graph it looks like it would solve the problem completely.

We are only talking about a 20 or 30% shortfall here.

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